InnoVen Capital commits Rs 418 crore in first half of 2018

MUMBAI: Venture debt and specialty-lending firm InnoVen Capital India has closed the first half of 2018 with commitments worth Rs 418 crore to be invested across early and growth-stage startups. The Temasek-backed specialty financing firm has already disbursed Rs 300 crore so far and is expected to invest the remaining capital within the next 2 months.

The capital deployment in the first six months of this year shows an annual growth of about 30% as compared to the same period last year, having added 10 new companies to its portfolio, including Eruditus, Elastic Run, FreshMenu and Flintobox. A large part of this growth has come from follow-on rounds, helping the firm write bigger cheques for 12 companies.

“We have been in discussions with startups to write larger cheques and hence expect the pace of capital deployment to continue briskly in the second half of the year as well,” InnoVen Capital CEO Ashish Sharma told ET. “Large ticket follow-on investments will continue to dominate our investment pattern going forward.”

InnoVen has been able to significantly increase its average investment ticket size to Rs 15-16 crore from Rs 5-7 crore it was writing earlier.

Innoven Capital invested over Rs 477 crore ($75 million) in 2017 growing at an annual growth rate of 25%. While the firm did not disclose specific figures for 2018, Sharma had told ET previously that InnovenCapital will look to close 2018 with over $85 million (Rs 585 crore) in deployments.

With this, Innoven Capital has invested over $330 million across 120 startups in India so far.

India’s venture debt market has been heating up with several funds including InnoVen Capital, AlteriaCapital, Trifecta Capital, Unicorn India Ventures, IntelleGrow and IvyCap Ventures flush with capital looking to deploy between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,000crore ($300 million) in a market where venture capital deployment has touched $3.6 billion in 2018 in just the first six months.

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